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1948. Jor-El, one of the members of the ruling council of the planet of Krypton, successfully prosecutes three traitors, led by General Zod, who have plotted to overthrow the government. But the council refuses to listen when Jor-El warns that Krypton is in imminent danger of falling into its own sun. Just before the destruction, Jor-El and his wife Lara launch their son (who will be programmed on the way with all his father's knowledge) to Earth, where his dense molecular structure will lend him superhuman powers. The boy is found in the American Mid-West by childless Jonathan Kent and his wife Martha, grows to a dawning awareness of his special abilities, and after Jonathan Kent's death leaves home for the far north, where Jor-El's spirit appears to him and takes him on an educative journey through the universe lasting twelve years. At age thirty, he arrives, as shy, bumbling Clark Kent, to work as a reporter on the Daily Planet newspaper in Metropolis; he is smitten by the briskly ambitious Lois Lane, and first unveils his secret identity as Superman when Lois is involved in a helicopter accident. Superman's crime-fighting exploits are soon the talk of the town, and Lois is delighted that he has arranged to see her again (she still fails to notice the lovelorn dark Kent), giving her the chance for an exclusive interview. Superman takes her on a flight round the city, and her resulting story attracts the interest of master criminal Lex Luthor, who is planning a fiendish coup (to blow all of California west of the San Andreas Fault into the sea, so converting the worthless land he has bought up east of the Fault into the new West Coast) and determines first to meet and incapacitate Superman. This he achieves with a radioactive fragment of kryptonite, which came from Superman's destroyed home and which Luthor deduces will be lethal to the Man of Steel. Superman is saved, however, by Luthor's soft-hearted mistress, Eve Teschmacher, and manages to stop one of the two army missiles Luthor has secretly programmed to carry out his plan. The other strikes the Fault, and Superman has to work wonders to stop California splitting in two. Lois dies in a rock fall, but in a desperate fury Superman circles the globe, reversing its motion until time is turned back and Lois resurrected. Finally, he delivers Luthor and his henchman Otis to a penitentiary.

For a while, Superman promises to be the new epic of self-conscious cinema, capitalising on the visual wit and technical dexterity of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Cagily, the film refuses to interpret Superman, but does acknowledge elements of his myth (childish /innocent fantasy; Depression-era hero) in a neatly compacted pre-credits sequence: the cinema curtains slide open to reveal another set of curtains opening on a smaller, black-and-white screen, with a caption, "June 1938"; over images of the original Superman comic strip, a child's voice talks of the hard times into which he was born and of the Daily Planet as "a symbol of hope for the city of Metropolis". The film then travels to the dying planet of Krypton, and the first line of dialogue - "This is no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination" - from the elder Jor-EI, indicates how Superman will be used: as a figment of the imagination, who can be parodied, romanticised and even treated as the Son of God, but who only makes sense as an object of wonder, a technological tease of the audience's suspension of disbelief. Richard Donner's direction is appropriately broad but not unnuanced; each segment of the film has its own mythic unity, related to various genres and movie types, and each has Superman developing not so much as a character as the focus for different kinds of entertainment. So far as the film has an overall image, it is of an eye -like the huge dome on Krypton where the three traitors are finally exposed to the heavens, or the 'windshield' shots which introduce both the Mid-West and Daily Planet sections - opening on some fresh spectacle. In a way, the most effective sequence in dramatic terms is the first, the prosecution of the traitors by Superman's father, both because of the intensity of its lighting and design effects and because it promises a conflict (the traitors' leader vows to have his revenge on Jor-EI and his heirs) which clearly could not arise once Superman is amongst the (relatively) powerless earthlings. Hence the film's tendency to play increasingly for laughs once he reaches invincible manhood. This opening, in fact, does not impinge on the present film at all; its consequences clearly being saved for Superman II when, apparently, the Man of Steel is to renounce his super-powers for more human pleasures, and the makers will face the more difficult task of rendering him dramatically acceptable rather than spectacularly useful. On dramatic grounds, Superman is in fact rather weak, both because Lex Luthor's late-developing scheme to found a new West Coast, for all its ingenuity, is confusingly plotted and undercut by the writers' decision to reserve most of their parody for Luthor - which reduces his villainy to the smirking camp of the Batman TV serial. The film also intersects here with the most barren genre imaginable, the straightforward disaster movie. Apart from the Daily Planet sequences, however, which are sprightly paced and sprinkled with Front Page cross-talk, the most successful section is that of Superman a-growing in the ideal/idyllic Mid-West. Here the painterly treatment of figures in a landscape achieves the kind of directness and simplicity that can contain the Nietzschean/evolutionary overtones which inevitably, but otherwise uncomfortably, cling to our hero (in this respect, the film often seems to be bankering after the monumental quality of 2001). That the film fails to maintain this tone is also inevitable once it submits to the need to fulfil its pyrotechnic promise and return to comic-strip adventure. Finally, we can never be convinced by Superman - as we are by the Common Man turned Visionary Artist of Close Encounters - that we too can participate in the film-maker/hero's visions.

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